Watch Your Back (9 page)

Next it was an entire barstool he brought, carried it up the stairs horizontally, and forced the curved back of the seat into the narrow opening he’d made. He levered the stool downward, pushing the trapdoor minimally upward, until the broken leg fell out, which he immediately wedged upright between trapdoor and the second step from the top. Freeing the barstool, he jammed it in, standing up, between the trapdoor and the fourth step, causing the leg to fall over.

It was slow work, and tiring, but with every move, using different pieces of furniture, he made the trapdoor infinitesimally lift, until eventually there was a wedge of space at the top of the stairs just large enough for a person to squirm through, being very sure he didn’t kick any props out of the way behind himself as he went.

He was very tired. It was almost daylight. Still, if he didn’t put everything back the way it was supposed to be, they would know they’d had a visitor, and that wouldn’t be a good thing for them to learn.

Weary, Dortmunder dragged the duckboard out of the way, opened the trapdoor and hooked it, then went back to the basement, took documents from the SLA folder containing uncle and nephew Medrick’s most recent addresses, put everything in the basement back where it had been, switched off the light down there, and went back up by the amber light over the cash register.

Weary. On the way out, he grabbed a bottle of Stoli the wedding guests had left behind. You kidding? He deserved it.

“Shouldn’t what?” Dortmunder asked. He was feeling skeptical and unobservant.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kelp said, and pushed through the swinging door into the Twilight Lounge, where they were at once drenched in the crooning of Dean Martin, his voice morphine–laced molasses.

It was J.C. Taylor who’d come up with this joint for their meeting ground, now that the O.J. was becoming increasingly unlikely. “Josey doesn’t know the place herself,” Tiny had explained to everybody, in various phone calls earlier today, Friday, after Dortmunder had dragged himself out of bed to make his own phone calls to say they needed a place to meet and discuss his discoveries of last night. “A guy down in the post office substation in her building says he goes there; it’s quiet, they mind their own business, there’s a back room we could use, just say Eddie told us about it.”

Well, it was worth a try. Anything, they all agreed, rather than gather in Dortmunder’s living room again. So, four o’clock Friday afternoon, here they were in the Twilight Lounge, a sprawling, lowlit joint half full of wage earners taking an indirect route to their suburban homes for the weekend, the whole scene suffused by the umber gurgle of Dean Martin.

There were two bartenders at work: one hardworking, blank–faced guy with his sleeves rolled up, one friendly girl with all the time in the world. Rather than break into the three conversations the girl already had under way, Kelp leaned over the bar and said to the guy en passant, “Eddie sent me.”

“Right.” The guy never made eye contact, but just kept watching what his busy hands were doing with various objects on the backbar as he said, “Eddie’s pal is already back there.”

Dortmunder wondered who that might be, but the busy barman was still talking: “Order your drinks, you can carry them back, you can run a tab until you’re done.”

“Thanks,” Kelp said. “I’ll have bourbon and ice, two glasses.”

“Same,” Dortmunder said, and the bartender snapped an efficient nod and went off with what looked like a trayful of piña coladas. True, it was August outside, but where were these commuters going?

As they waited for their drinks, Kelp said, “Well, it’s more efficient than the O.J.”

Dortmunder thought, is that what we wanted? But he knew he was just in a bad mood, irritated by change simply because it was change, so all he said was, “I wonder who Eddie’s pal is.”

Kelp shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

That was wisdom, and Dortmunder nodded to it. Take it as it comes. What the hell. More efficient than the O.J.; maybe that’d be okay.

Efficiently the barman slapped four glasses onto the gleaming wood in front of them. “Around the bar to your left,” he said, not looking at them, watching instead the next job his busy hands were concerned with, “then past the rest–rooms, it’s on your right.”

They thanked his departing back, picked up their glasses, and followed instructions. Past the end of the bar they found themselves in a quietly lit, neat corridor with carpet on the floor and wall sconces and gay–nineties scenes in frames on the walls. The first door on the right said LADIES. The second door on the right said GENTLEMEN. The third door on the right was open, and seated in there, looking irritable, was Tiny.

This was a larger back room than the one at the O.J., and more elaborate. The wall–sconce–and–gay–nineties theme continued in here, and there were four small round tables geometrically placed on the maroon carpet, each containing a tablecloth and a stand–up triangular menu of, on one side, our specialty drinks, and on the other, our specialty snacks. Tiny had already tossed onto the floor behind him the menu from his table.

“Hey, Tiny,” Kelp said as they entered. “Different here, huh?”

Tiny held up a tall glass of red liquid that looked like, but was not, cherry pop. “They wanted,” he said, “to put the vodka and the wine in separate glasses. I told them, they could give me as many glasses as they want, they get one back.”

As Kelp put his two glasses at the place to Tiny’s right, he said, “We made a kind of a different deal.”

“The customer,” Tiny informed him, “is always right.”

Putting his own store of glasses at the place to Tiny’s left, Dortmunder said, “Is Murch’s Mom coming? If so, we’re five, and this is a table for four.”

“I only talked to the son,” Tiny said, and Stan Murch himself walked in, a glass of beer in one hand, and a little shallow bowl with wavy blue designs on it in the other. “I’m glad my Mom isn’t coming,” he informed them. “If she could see the traffic in Manhattan. What’s this, I got to sit with my back to the door?”

“You get to close the door,” Tiny suggested.

So Stan put his glass and his bowl at the remaining spot at the small table and turned about to shut the hall door. When he turned back, Kelp said, “What’s the bowl?”

“They say, salt.” Stan sat, sipped beer, frowned upon the bowl without affection, and said, “I asked for a saltshaker, they don’t have saltshakers here, they got these little bowls.”

Leaning forward to look at the grains of white salt almost completely filling the bowl, Kelp said, “That’s gotta be wasteful. You won’t use hardly any of that.”

“They don’t throw it out,” Stan told him. “I saw on the tables out there, they just leave them around.”

Kelp said, “You mean, everybody’s fingers in the same salt?”

Stan shrugged. “What are you gonna do? I figure, the alcohol in the beer’ll kill the germs. The problem with Manhattan, on the other hand, it’s August, nobody’s here, it’s full of tourists.”

Dortmunder said, “Then whadaya mean, there’s nobody here?”

“There’s nobody here that
belongs
here,” Stan explained. “The real New Yorkers go away for the summer. Right now, there’s nobody driving in the city that knows
how
to drive in the city. You got people now, they’re from some other
continent,
they come here in the summer, they got a special deal, hotel and a car rental, they’re so pleased with themselves. They come to New York City to drive a
car?
Drive a car at home in Yakburg, not here, you’ll never figure out what you’re
doing
here, a week in circles, lost, they go home, their friends say, ‘So how’d you find New York?’ they say, ‘We didn’t.’ ”

“We’re here,” Tiny said, “for Dortmunder to tell us how he found the O.J.”

“I’m ready,” Stan said. With thumb and forefinger, he delicately sprinkled a few grains of salt onto his beer, which enthused.

When Dortmunder finished watching Stan and his salt, he said, “Okay, I went in there last night,” and he told them about the wedding party and the basement and the SLA and the Medrick family saga.

Kelp said, “A nephew.”

“Not one of the better ones,” Dortmunder suggested.

Tiny rumbled, “There are good nephews?”

Kelp said, “My nephew Victor isn’t so bad.”

“Victor,” Tiny repeated. “The FBI guy.”

“Ex–FBI,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder said, “They threw him out. He wanted the FBI to have a secret handshake.”

Stan said, “I thought they did have a secret handshake.”

Tiny said, “Kelp’s nephew Victor is not the point. The O.J.’s nephew Medrick is the point.”

“Raphael Medrick,” Dortmunder said, taking from his shirt pocket the two folded documents he’d liberated from the O.J.’s safe. “He’s in Queens.”

“We don’t know what he was on probation for,” Kelp pointed out.

“Nonviolent,” Dortmunder said. “It’s probably not that he’s mobbed–up to begin with, he’s just some schmuck, got in trouble, his family helped out, his uncle wants to retire, you can see it now. It’s great for everybody, the old guy can go retire in Florida, the young guy is gonna be fine once he’s got some responsibility to be responsible for, the family’s gonna keep an eye on him —”

“Sure,” Kelp said.

“They always do,” Stan said.

Tiny said, “You know, all this is after it’s over. It’s over.”

Dortmunder said, “The O.J.’s still open.”

“If you call that open,” Tiny said. “But the goods have been bought, Dortmunder, the credit line’s used up. The place is a shell, it’s going down. What we’re
supposed
to be thinking about is that place on Fifth Avenue, full of good things that Albright is gonna pay us all this green.”

“We’re thinking about it,” Kelp assured him. “We’re working on it. Aren’t we, John?”

“In a way,” Dortmunder said.

“Let’s think about it some more,” Tiny suggested.

“Definitely,” Dortmunder said.

Stan said, “Just for the heck of it, though, why don’t we go and take a look at this Raphael?”

“Well, yeah,” Tiny said. “Sure we’re gonna go look at Raphael. Just don’t think anything’s gonna be done about the O.J.”

Kelp said, “In that case, why bother to go see him at all?”

Tiny smiled; the others flinched. “Because,” Tiny said, “I wish to attract his attention.”

The system was, most vacationers reached the resort on Saturday afternoon, coming down from mainland North America on charter flights. Some were singles; some were couples; some were families. Among the singles, the pairing off was usually accomplished by some time Sunday and frequently involved fraternization between guests and staff, an activity on which management neither beamed nor frowned. Just as often, however, guests would find each other perfectly acceptable. And the most acceptable often was the long–term guest like Preston, who could, in his phrase, “show the ropes” to the lovely newcomer.

Over the following week, the newly minted couples would explore the wonders of the island and of one another, and then, on Saturday morning, the vacationers would leave again, so that the staff had the few midday hours to prepare the rooms for the next week’s arrivals. Friday night, therefore, was the moment of truth among many of the pairs at the resort. Was this good–bye? Would phone numbers and e–mail addresses be exchanged? Would lies be told?

Not by Preston Fareweather. He lived for Friday evening and the truths he would tell the current stand–in for the despicable ex–wives. This week it was the lovely Beryl.

“I’ve had the most wonderful time, Pres,” she murmured in his ear, on her bed on that final Friday, after an evening spent mostly with white wine on the veranda outside her room, contemplating a wonderful moon, barely one–quarter full but gleaming as white as a mime’s smile for all that.

“I know you have, my darling,” Preston murmured back, left arm curled around her, one eye on the bedside clock. Physically he was spent, but mentally he still had a few moves to make. “And I know,” he murmured, “you haven’t minded my little japeries.”

“Of course not,” she murmured, snuggling her button nose in close to the artery so strongly beating in his throat.

“The snake in your underwear drawer.”

The chuckle against his throat was lifelike but not entirely realistic. “That
was
a bit of a surprise,” she murmured. “I don’t know where you even found a snake on this island.”

“It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it,” he murmured. “Then there was the glass of icewater I ‘accidentally’ spilled on you sunbathing.”

“You
are
a scamp,” she murmured, good humor and forgiveness purring in her voice.

“But you didn’t mind, did you?”

“Not really,” she murmured. “Not when it’s
you.
”

“Not even when I removed your bathing suit top in the swimming pool?”

She reared up a bit, to give him a serious but accepting look. “That
was
going a bit far,” she said. “Especially when you carried it all the way here and wouldn’t bring it back. If I hadn’t been able to borrow that towel, I don’t know
what
I would have done.”

“I hope you thanked the person who loaned you the towel.”

“Of course I did.” Then Beryl gave him a keen look and said, “The
woman
who loaned me the towel, Pres. I certainly wouldn’t borrow a towel from a
man.
”

Innocent, he said, “But why not?”

“Not when I’m with
you.
”

“But you weren’t with me. I was here, with your bathing suit top.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Preston,” she said, forgetting their private little nickname in her agitation. Sitting up completely, topless again, she said, “We’ve been together all week, you know we have. You’ve absolutely monopolized me.”

“Monopolized?”

“You know what I mean. Ever since your friend Alan introduced us last Saturday, I’ve felt there was something … I felt there could be something … I just sensed a kind of special — Oh, you
know
what I mean!”

He stretched lazily on his side of the bed, an overweight but extremely comfortable cat. “You mean we had good fun for a week,” he suggested. “Fuck and frolic, a little time out from the cares of everyday life.”

She stared at him.“
What
did you say?”

“Frolic,” he said, and beamed at her, the cat with the canary feather in the corner of his mouth.

“Well, frolic,” she said, distracted, but her agenda would not let her dwell on a passing bewilderment. “That
has
been wonderful, Pres, of course it has. This last week —”

“Yes, I know,” he murmured.

She lay down beside him again. “This last week has been so much more than I could have hoped —”

“Yes, it has.”

That his responses were just a little off forced a certain jump–start quality to her own presentation. “Yes,” she echoed, then got back to her script: “You’ll be staying here another week, won’t you?”

“Another week, mm, yes,” he murmured, thinking already of what tomorrow might bring.

“How long
have
you been here, Pres?”

“Oh, when we’re in paradise,” he murmured, “we never count the days. Forever, I believe.” Because he could never tell any of them that he’d been here so far nearly three years, with no end in sight. That might make them a little skittish.

“I’ve been so sad,” she murmured, “at the prospect of our parting tomorrow, I asked at the office if they could squeeze me in for just one more week. Would you like that, if I could stay?”

“Oh, absolutely not,” he murmured. “You can’t put yourself in a financial fix just for little me.”

That response was
so
off–kilter it got her up to a seated position again. “Financial fix?” She stared at him, not quite sure how she was supposed to handle this one. If he’d agreed to her staying on, he knew, she herself would have mentioned her financial woes and suggested he might help ease her burden in the days ahead, since he so much wanted her companionship, but once he’d mentioned her money troubles himself as a reason for her not to stay, what was she to do?

“We don’t care about finances, Pres,” she finally decided on. “We care about one another.”

“Oh, darling, Beryl,” he told her, “by last Monday morning at the latest you were e–mailing friends to find out everything you could about my finances.”

“How can you
say
such a thing?”

“Because you bimbos always do. But you don’t —”

“
Bimbos?
”

“But you don’t realize,” he went inexorably on, while discreetly moving his arms to protect his privates, just in case she turned out to be one of the physical ones, “that of course I’m doing the same thing. I know exactly how much you’re into Mr. Marcus Leominster for, darling Beryl, and I know you don’t otherwise have a single asset worth mentioning, other than your singular ass, of course, and I know that one week here husband–hunting is already a strain on —”

“
Husband–hunting!
”

“I’m afraid, Beryl,” he said, chortling by now, “I’ve wasted an entire week of your dwindling finances, your dwindling time, and if I may say so, your dwindling looks.”

“How can you — How can you —”

“Beryl,” he said, smiling at her face, which now looked like a wax museum piece in the middle of a major fire, “why on earth would you put up with a fat boor like me except that you wanted to get into my pants? For my wallet, of course.”

“You son —”

The phone rang. Beryl stared at it, as Preston rose for the last time from her bed and said, “Timing is everything.”

“Timing?” The phone rang again, but now Beryl was staring at Preston. “You know who that is? On the telephone?”

“Of course,” Preston said, reaching for his flame red bathing trunks. “It’s Alan Pinkleton. He’s calling to ask me to play Scrabble.”

“
Scrabble!
”

“Tell him, would you,” Preston said, as he moved toward the door, “I’m on my way?”

The phone continued to ring, fading with distance, as he strolled along the bougainvillea–scented wandering concrete path among the bungalows. Pathway lighting was dim and discreet; the air was soft and warm, the night a joy. The fading sound of the telephone made him think for some reason of the song “I Love a Parade,” so that’s what he whistled as he strolled back to his own little bungalow, where Alan had long since hung up the unanswered phone and where the Scrabble set was already laid out on the table on the veranda.

He was in such a good frame of mind, Preston was, that he didn’t even object when Alan, who wasn’t supposed to win, won handily.